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Glimmers of Hope

If you’re elected president or prime minister in pretty much any country in the developed world today, you’re faced with the same set of challenges: to reduce national deficits without choking off a fragile recovery; to trim the welfare state and raise taxes while still funding the things that lead to long-term growth; to try to enact brutally painful measures at a time when voters don’t trust their leaders; to do it at a time when politics are polarized and a hundred different interest groups have the ability to block change.

The chances that the world’s leaders are going to be able to do these things successfully are between slim and none. It’s hard enough to figure out the right mix of spending cuts and tax increases. It’s nearly impossible to build a political majority willing to enact them. Sometime over the next decade or so, the world will probably suffer from another series of crushing fiscal crises with significant economic pain and maximum political turmoil.

But, occasionally, there’s a ray of hope. Occasionally, a country stumbles into a political arrangement that may help it avert a crisis. And that’s what’s happened in Britain.

Britain has all the fiscal problems that plague most developed nations. British households are carrying more debt than those in any other rich country: 170 percent of annual income. British general government debt is surging — not at Greek levels yet, but getting there.

The political culture is brutally adversarial. The political extremes are strong. The Conservative Party didn’t win this month’s election outright because 5 percent of voters preferred the anti-immigrant parties.

Moreover, the election produced no clear-cut result. That would seem to make it harder to undertake the sort of necessary painful changes. Yet over the past few days, many British analysts are coming to the wary conclusion that something good may have happened.

Photo

David Brooks

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, was forced to confront the fact that even in the best possible circumstances, the Conservatives could get only 36 percent of the vote. He was faced with the possibility that the two other parties might form a permanent anti-right coalition. But as Daniel Finkelstein of The Times of London has pointed out, Cameron seized the problem and made it an opportunity. By cutting a deal with the Liberal Democrats, he has built a center-right coalition.

In so doing, he has changed the nature of his own party, and the nature of the Liberal Democrats, his coalition partner. If he had a small majority, he would have been hostage to his most ideological members. As it is, he has potentially weakened the strong partisans in both parties, empowered the pragmatists who are better-suited to coalition politics and created a less polarized political climate.

Matthew Parris, also of The Times of London, writes that watching Cameron and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ leader, “was like witnessing a coup. Millions of viewers will have shared my impression almost of watching two men staging a putsch against their own parties, against the entire British political system, and against the ingrained assumptions of more than a century of parliamentary government.” Parris sees the potential for a softening of the normal adversarial culture, a strengthening of the sort of leader who likes compromise and a weakening of the sort that detests it.

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The two parties are now in an economically conservative, socially liberal embrace that they hope will last for five years. The parties disagree on many things (immigration, Europe, electoral reform), but they tend to agree on the need for fiscal restraint. The efforts to control debt will be strengthened by having a broad coalition behind them. The political pain will be shared.

Cameron has the opportunity to look less like a party leader and more like a national leader. Today’s coalition will compel the Tories to formulate policies in new ways, and lodge them closer to the center of the electorate.

It helps that the Conservative government has already moved to a more communitarian “Big Society” governing philosophy. No longer purely free market, the Tories emphasize rebuilding social bonds. That means they speak less about slashing government as a matter of principle and more about improving it and decentralizing power. This little platoons approach has left- and right-wing variants and has the potential to break down the old ideologies.

Of course, it all could fail. The parties could reject the implant. In U.S. terms, it’s like a marriage between Marco Rubio (The Tory base) and the accumulated wisdom of the Ivy League (the Liberal Democrats). But Cameron and Clegg are nothing if not flexible. The entire political class understands what needs to be done. The financial markets will insist on some serious budgetary restraint.

Without any planning but by sheer good luck, the British may have stumbled into an arrangement that will be a model for all the other countries in the same desperate straits.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 14, 2010, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Glimmers Of Hope. Today's Paper|Subscribe